Technology

The Mozilla developers have added private browsing to the Firefox web browser since version 3.5. This basically allows a Firefox users to switch to a mode where no records of the web browsing session will be stored on the computer system. The way it is implemented is different from the incognito mode in the Google Chrome web browser. Firefox users can only use the private browsing mode if they agree to close all open windows and tabs in the web browser which means that there is not a way to work with a normal Firefox session and one private browsing session in another window.

This behavior is changed by the Firefox add-on Private Browsing Window which – as the name suggests – provides the means to launch a private browsing session in a new window without closing the standard session first.

The extension adds a Private Browsing Window link to the Firefox Tools menu and to the status bar of the browser. A click on the link or button will launch a new Firefox window in private browsing mode. The extension will display an add-on installation dialog upon first usage that tries to install the Private Browsing Window Helper extension. This extension is not required for the core functionality. It does however improve interaction between non-private and private windows. It specifically adds an option to open links in the non-private or private browsing windows.

Private Browsing Window makes it a tad easier to work with the private browsing mode in Firefox. The extension is available for Firefox 3.6 only and can be downloaded from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on gallery website.
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